Wednesday, March 9, 2011

New version of Team Viewer

Since my first blog post about Team Viewer has become a sort of "support forum", which has reached 125 comments now, I decided to write about the new version.

As I already wrote on my first post Team Viewer is really great if you have to help kin and kith with all sorts of computer problems. It is much easier and takes less time to solve a problem if you can see it as if someone (who does not know much about computers) describes you what he/she sees. You could also use remote desktop through the MSN Messenger but I tried it out and I had problems to get it to work. Firewalls are the biggest problem for not experienced users.

Team Viewer is very easy to use and has no problems with firewalls; that is what I like so much about it; and of course that it is FREE for personal use ;-). Also a computer noob can run it and tell you the ID and the password. Team Viewer is also very useful to maintain remote machines such as your home server.

The application has reached version 6 now and they say that they have improved many things such as performance, usability and much more. If you are interested in all the details have a look at http://www.teamviewer.com/en/download/tv6.aspx. You can also use it to share files with someone over the internet but since I’m using DropBox to store and share files I don’t use this feature very much.

Since I am a proud owner of an Android Smartphone (Samsung Galaxy S) I was curious to try out also the Team Viewer application for Android. It is really amazing how good it works!! I tried it over Wifi, where the speed is quite good, and over my mobile phone network where it goes much slower but is still usable. This allows me to help kin and kith with their computer problems also on the go :-) There exists also an iPhone and iPad app but I couldn’t try it out because I don’t have one.

I am new to TeamViewer and it is nice. I am having a strange issue on Ubuntu though, when the screen locks, my remote keyboard cannot enter characters to enter the password to unlock. Any idea what I need to do?

Yeah, TeamViewer is pretty decent (and easy to use), but I've actually found another solution that I like even more... I currently use RHUB for all my remote support needs — because all the functions I need are bundled into the same box, and it’s only a one-time cost.